g roofs and to stand out against the dazzling sky a square,
latticed remnant of a belvedere. You can see that the house it surmounts
is a large, solid, rectangular pile, and that it stands directly on the
street at what residents call the "upper, river corner," though the river
is several squares away on the right. There are fifty people in this old
rue Royale who can tell you their wild versions of this house's strange
true story against any one who can do this present writer the honor to
point out the former residence of 'Sieur George, Madame Delicieuse, or
Doctor Mossy, or the unrecognizably restored dwelling of Madame Delphine.

I fancy you already there. The neighborhood is very still. The streets are
almost empty of life, and the cleanness of their stone pavements is
largely the cleanness of disuse. The house you are looking at is of brick,
covered with stucco, which somebody may be lime-washing white, or painting
yellow or brown, while I am saying it is gray. An uncovered balcony as
wide as the sidewalk makes a deep arcade around its two street sides. The
last time I saw it it was for rent, and looked as if it had been so for a
long time; but that proves nothing. Every one of its big window-shutters
was closed, and by the very intensity of their rusty silence spoke a
hostile impenetrability. Just now it is occupied.

They say that Louis Philippe, afterwards king of the French, once slept in
one of its chambers. That would have been in 1798; but in 1798 they were
not building such tall buildings as this in New Orleans--did not believe
the soil would uphold them. As late as 1806, when 'Sieur George's house,
upon the St. Peter street corner, was begun, people shook their heads; and
this house is taller than 'Sieur George's. I should like to know if the
rumor is true. Lafayette, too, they say, occupied the same room. Maybe
so. That would have been in 1824-25. But we know he had elegant
apartments, fitted up for him at the city's charge, in the old Cabildo.
Still--

It was, they say, in those, its bright, early days, the property of the
Pontalbas, a noble Franco-Spanish family; and I have mentioned these
points, which have no close bearing upon our present story, mainly to
clear the field of all mere they-says, and leave the ground for what we
know to be authenticated fact, however strange.

The entrance, under the balcony, is in Royal street. Within a deep, white
portal, the walls and ceiling of which are covered w